Seventh Book of Decretals, 1690

Pierre Mathieu (Petrus Matthæus), a canonist of the sixteenth century, published in 1690, under the title of "Septimus Liber Decretalium" ('Seventh Book of Decretals'), a collection of canons arranged according to the order of the papal Decretals of Gregory IX, containing some Decretals of preceding popes, especially of those from the reign of Sixtus IV (1464-71) to that of Sixtus V, in 1590. It was an entirely private collection and devoid of scientific value. Some editions of the "Corpus Juris Canonici" (Frankfort, 1590; Lyons 1621 and 1671; Justus Henning Boehmer's edition, Halle, 1747) contained the text of this "Liber septimus" as an appendix.

Decretales Clementis Papæ VIII, 1598

The name has been given also to a canonical collection officially known as "Decretales Clementis Papæ VIII". It owes the name of "Liber Septimus" to Cardinal Pinelli, prefect (president) of the special congregation appointed by Sixtus V to draw up a new ecclesiastical code, who, in his manuscript notes, applied this title to it; Fagnanus and Benedict XIV imitated him in this, and it has retained the name. It was to supply the defect of an official codification of the canon law from the date of the publication of the "Clementinæ" (1317), that Gregory XIII appointed about the year 1580 a body of cardinals to undertake the work. In 1587 Sixtus V established the congregation mentioned above. The printed work was submitted to Clement VIII, in 1598 for his approbation, which was refused. A new revision undertaken in 1607-08 had a similar fate, the reigning pope Paul V declining to approve the "Liber Septimus" as the obligatory legal code of the Church. It is divided into five books, subdivided into titles and chapters, and contains disciplinary and dogmatic canons of the Council of Florence, First Lateran Council and that of Trent, and apostolic constitutions of twenty-eight popes from Gregory IX to Clement VIII. The refusals of approbation by Clement VIII and Paul V are to be attributed, not to the fear of seeing the canons of the Council of Trent glossed by canonists (which was forbidden by the Bull of Paul IV, "Benedictus Deus", confirming the Council of Trent), but to the political situation of the day, several states having refused to admit some of the constitutions inserted in the new collection, and also to the fact that the Council of Trent had not yet been accepted by the French Government; it was therefore feared that the Governments would refuse to recognize the new code. It also seems a mistake to have included in the work decisions that were purely and exclusively dogmatic and as such entirely foreign to the domain of canon law. This collection, which appeared about the end of the sixteenth century, was edited by François Sentis ("Clementis Papæ VIII Decretales", Freiburg, 1870).